


First Born

by Deannie



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Gen, Hurt Dean Winchester, Hurt Sam Winchester, Hurt/Comfort
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2006-04-20
Updated: 2006-04-20
Packaged: 2017-12-12 11:04:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 6
Words: 14,558
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/810863
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Deannie/pseuds/Deannie
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Too soon after the events of "Something Wicked," Dean and Sam come upon a town where Dean must take the lead in finding the truth.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

Dad sucked.

Tim Forten kicked the crap out of a few rocks on the ground and looked out into the surrounding trees.

"It's not my fault Johnny doesn't listen," he griped to himself, settling onto a smelly old log. He picked up a pebble and threw it... a whole, like,  _four_  feet. "Wasn't like he even got to the end of the driveway."

Johnny Forten, three-year-old, was a total pain in the butt. At ten, Tim figured he shouldn't have to pull babysitting duty anymore. Maybe after this, Dad wouldn't trust him to do it.

Maybe after this, Tim wouldn't bother to go back home at all.

He wrapped his arms around himself and shivered. It was cold out here!  _Maybe because,_  he told himself,  _you ran out in the middle of the night, you doofus!_  Well, okay, so it was only eight o'clock, but it felt later. Darker.

He wasn't going back, though. Not yet. Dad had yelled at him, telling him Johnny could have run into the street, could have been killed, and what the h-e-double toothpicks was Tim doing if he wasn't keeping an eye on his little brother? Tim had just hung his head, let Dad yell, and gone to his room like a good little boy. And gone right out the window as soon as he could pack his PSP and comic books into his backpack.

Dad was going to freak when he finally got finished making sure precious little Johnny was okay and came to Tim's room to yell at him some more.

Served him right.

But it  _was_  cold. Really cold, even for April. Maybe he should go home. The woods were kind of creepy at night. Maybe that serial killer the news was talking about was actually real. Maybe he was out here right now!

Tim looked around apprehensively. Wow it was dark! He shivered from more than the sudden cold snap, and the first niggling of fear started growing in his gut. He should definitely go home.

_"Mommy?"_

He jumped a little on hearing the sad voice. He couldn't see anything this far into the trees.  _Should have stuck to the side of the woods by the streetlights, dummy._

_"Mommy! Please!"_

"Is..." He took a deep breath. Might be some lost kid, right? It didn't sound like a serial killer. "Is somebody there?"

Tim Forten never saw what killed him--he was dead in seconds, with little more than a breath to let him know his time was over.

And he wasn't the first...

* * * * * *

While the road wasn't exactly swimming in front of his eyes or anything, Dean Winchester knew that he'd just about reached the end of his driving stamina for the day. He considered waking Sam to take the next leg of the trip, but one look at his exhausted brother, sprawled haphazardly over the passenger seat, had him looking for the nearest exit with a lodging sign. That fucking striga had taken more out of Sam than he was willing to admit, and, only two days after the fact, Dean wasn't quite ready to let the incident go too easily himself.

"Myers, Ohio--13 miles" the sign ahead read, with the requisite gas, food, and lodging logos underneath.

"Good enough," Dean murmured, spurring the Impala on a little faster. The sooner he got there, the sooner he could try to catch up on some of the sleep he hadn't gotten in Wisconsin...

Fifteen minutes later, he was pulling up in front of a neat and tidy little hotel just at the edge of Myers.  _Mason's Travel Inn,_  it proclaimed itself. He shrugged. Didn't look half bad, though at this point, Dean would have been happy with a Motel 6.

He looked over at his brother and grinned. Sam had slept through all of Indiana and half of Ohio and that was damn sure the longest sleep he'd had in months. "Aw," Dean whispered with an evil smile. "Well, aren't you cute?"

He leaned in close, his eyes shining. "Sammy?" The call was high and teasing. Feminine. "Sammy, wake up."

Sam frowned, shifting in his sleep. Dean just smiled wider.

"Oh, come on, Sammy. Wake up, honey."

Sam grunted in confusion and opened bleary eyes, slamming back into his seat in surprise as Dean's face loomed over him.

"Jerk," he muttered thickly, still not quite with it, but awake enough to be pissed.

Dean laughed. "Man, you gotta get a better comeback."

Sam rubbed an eye, murmured something that sounded suspiciously like "fuck you," and looked around. "Where are we?"

Dean indulged in an expansive gesture. "Myers, Ohio. Population 4500."

Sam just looked at him for a minute. "Why?"

"Because I'm tired," Dean replied, opening the car door and talking over the squeak of metal on metal. "I'm tired, and I want to go to bed."

"I could have driven--"

"No, Sammy." Dean opened the trunk as they spoke, pulling out their safe-for-prying-eyes duffel bags and locking the rest of their equipment back inside. "Bed. Shower. Sleep." He threw Sam's duffel at him and pointed to the hotel lobby, walking ahead with purpose. "Bed. Now."

"Yes, sir," he heard Sam mutter quietly, a smile in the sleepy tone.

* * * * * *

"Why can't we stay in places like this all the time?" Dean wondered aloud some twenty minutes later. The Travel Inn--which turned out to be the only hotel in town--was clean and welcoming, the rooms spacious. His bed was perfectly not-too-soft and not-too-hard; there was a coffeemaker and complimentary mini-fridge--he was even willing to bet that the shower might actually have a little water pressure for a change.

"Well, you do have to watch your credit rating," Sam stated, deadpan.

Dean snapped his fingers. "Right. Forgot about that."

Sam snorted, turning on the television as he headed to his own bed, and Dean settled back on the headboard, watching idly as a local sportscaster talked about the latest high school basketball scores.

"...Thank you, Larry," said the perky newscaster, turning suddenly, dramatically, serious. "In breaking news, we have a report of another death in Myers. Harold Parsons is on the scene."

Dean sat up straighter and exchanged a glance with his brother. What were the odds, huh? Actually, scratch that. The way Dean's world worked, he should have expected this in some perverted way.

"Well, Sandy, the grim series of deaths continues here in Myers, where another young boy lies dead tonight." Normally, Dean would have expected a nice little photo of the kid, probably a candid where he looked happy and safe. It was a dramatic license thing.

But apparently, they hadn't had time to hunt one up, because the camera focused in on the activity of police and coroner's men behind the reporter instead. "The name of the child has yet to be _officially_  released," the talking head continued, acknowledging the fact that, in a small town, nothing had to be official to be widely known. "But according to an unnamed neighbor, the boy and his father had been heard fighting earlier in the evening, and the boy was found to be missing some time later." The camera focused back on the reporter, but the action in the background was still drawing Dean's attention. Always looking for clues, even when it wasn't his fight.

"It is not known whether the father is a suspect at this time." There was a pleasant thought. "The community mounted a massive search, and volunteers found the boy's body in a small glade just half an hour ago. The police are not giving out any information at this time, but it appears that this is just the latest in a bizarre string of deaths this week in Myers--"

Great. More dead kids. Dean grabbed his shaving kit and headed for the bathroom, ignoring the worried look Sam gave him as he passed. "I'm taking a shower," he grumbled, the shine of a nice tidy hotel room and the promise of a good night's sleep blown apart by the reminder of Wisconsin.

He let the water soothe away the image of that damned striga feeding off of Sam, and he stayed in a lot longer than he had planned. When he got out, Sam was already asleep again, sprawled out on top of the covers, still wearing his day clothes.

Dean found himself grinning. Seeing Sam snoring away, alive and well, was doing a lot to make him feel better.

He turned off the television, dug an extra blanket out of the closet, dropped it on Sam with neither style nor grace, and got ready for bed.

He must have been even more exhausted than he thought, because he was dead to the world almost the moment he slid under the sheets.

* * * * * *

 

>   
> __"You have to take care of your little brother now, Dean." Dad's voice was the same sad, quiet rumble it had been since Mommy went away, and his smile was soft. "We're all he has left."_ _
> 
> And Sam and Daddy were all Dean had left, too.
> 
> Daddy gave him a kiss on the forehead and pulled the covers up over him before walking around Sammy's basinet and sliding into the other bed in the room. They were staying with a friend of Daddy's because Daddy wouldn't go home, even though the firemen had said they could. Dean didn't blame him--he didn't ever want to go back there. It smelled like smoke now, instead of Mommy.
> 
> Daddy never turned out the light anymore, and that was okay, too. And Daddy slept a lot, but only on nights like this, when he smelled like the wine they gave the adults at church, only stronger. Dean heard Sammy shift in his basinet as Daddy began to snore, and he rolled over so that he could watch his little brother. Because he was supposed to take care of him--Daddy said.
> 
> The basinet must have been here already. Sammy's crib was all burned up now. This looked like it was made for a girl a long, long time ago. It had old sheets that looked like somebody had made them by hand, and green and brown ribbons. There was a bright silver charm hanging off of the bow of ribbon at the end of the crib, and Dean stared at it for a long time. He decided the whole crib looked kind of stupid.
> 
> Sammy finally fell asleep, too, so Dean rolled onto his back and stared at the ceiling. It was dirty-white and boring. Not like his ceiling at home, with the cool glow-in-the-dark stars and planets and stuff. It was boring enough, in fact, that Dean started to drift, and the room seemed to darken around him, even though he knew Daddy had the light on.
> 
> "Mommy?"
> 
> _Dean sat up in his bed, looking around the room that should have been lit by the weird bowling-pin lamp by Daddy's bed. It was dark, and the voice hadn't sounded like anybody he knew._
> 
> _And it was cold. It wasn't supposed to be cold--Daddy always told him to leave the windows closed and locked. Always. But he could feel the cold. Winter cold._
> 
> _"Daddy?"_
> 
> _Daddy didn't answer. He didn't even snore._
> 
> _"Sammy?" Now he was really getting scared. He was supposed to take care of Sammy, but he didn't think he'd be able to find him in all this dark._
> 
> _Dean felt the air get close, felt his lungs start to burn. He couldn't breathe; could only grip the bed frame, the wood digging into his hands. The darkness around him was changing as he struggled for one last breath..._
> 
> _And somewhere in the darkness, Sammy started crying..._

* * * * * *

Dean's eyes snapped open and he let air slide in and out of his lungs for a minute.

Huh.

Well, that sucked.

* * * * *


	2. Chapter 2

His gaze took in the dirty-white and boring ceiling above him as his thoughts drifted back to that basinet in his dream. That was weird.

Sammy never had a real crib after Mom died. And the first week after the fire, the three of them had stayed with one of Dad's friends, all right, but all of them slept in one big king-sized bed. Dad would hug Dean to him like he was afraid something was going to drag his older son off into the darkness (little had Dean known at the time that that was always a distinct possibility), and Sammy had slept on the other side of the bed, cushioned on four sides by pillows to make sure he didn't roll off in the middle of the night.

A few days after the fire department had cleared the house, Dad had gone back in and brought out the crap-plastic playpen they'd originally bought for Dean a few years before, and that had been Sam's crib until he'd graduated to a big kid's bed. Even when whoever they were staying with had a crib Dad could borrow, there'd certainly never been anything as fancy as that basinet, with its green and brown ribbons and delicate silver charm. And that charm--all delicate Irish knotwork... like an amulet, almost....

Huh.

Dean looked across the room at Sam's snoring form, flashing on the dream-image of their dad with his quiet, almost polite snore. Sam had that same snore--when he bothered to sleep. Hell, he'd never slept much. He didn't always have nightmares, really--usually--just a genius-sized brain that wouldn't shut up. Dean vividly remembered a number of times when they were kids; he would wake in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom and find Sammy lying in his bed across the room, eyes on the ceiling. Just thinking.

_Or waiting for the blood to drop._

He wiped away a sudden vision of Sam's girlfriend on the ceiling of that old Palo Alto apartment and sat up, resisting the urge to turn on the light and banish the monsters. It had never worked before, so why bow to superstition now, right?

He figured Sam might sleep through for a while longer, so he padded quietly across the room and opened the laptop, turning off the speaker and plugging in the phone line. He wasn't planning on going back to sleep any time soon; might as well see what he could find out about the deaths that were going on in the area.

Mysterious deaths weren't always their purview, but as often as not,  _something_  was lurking  _somewhere_. And given the last week with that striga and the thought of that kid last night and his dream, Dean really, really wanted to kill something, just to make himself feel better.

 

Two hours of web searching later, he definitely wasn't feeling better at all.

Tim Forten had been the kid's name. He was the latest of four deaths, all one night after another, all happening somewhere between 8:00 pm and midnight. Two kids, a teenager, and a guy about Sam's age.

The news site from the nearby big town newspaper didn't have a lot on Tim, fresh as his death was. It did have the photo Dean had expected last night: Tim, who had a bright smile and dark, curly hair. Birthday party. Happy.

He convinced himself it didn't remind him of Sam at that age and moved on.

The news site did have stories about each of the others, and Dean read them all through carefully, looking for patterns he'd learned from his father over years of hunting. All male, but no age similarity. Nothing in common regarding social status, family status... Hell, the guy in his twenties didn't even live in Myers--he was just passing through. His body was going to be released by the local coroner in a couple of days, so his family must either be in Myers or en route to it.

Maybe Dean and Sam could talk to them before they left. Find something out...

That reasonable plan of action caused Dean to pause, glancing over at Sam, who had begun to shift uncomfortably in his sleep.  _Another nightmare, probably._  Dean just hoped it wasn't like his own.

And was that the real reason he was considering investigating this one? Nothing said this series of deaths was paranormal. No magical symbols on the bodies (that the cops were releasing information about, anyway), no bizarre occurrences before or after the deaths. Hell, for all he knew there was just some serial killer prowling the area, as the news site seemed to be implying.

Except that he didn't think so.

Hunter's instinct, maybe? He shrugged in the predawn light, dismissing the creepy feeling he was still getting from the dream. Whatever. They'd ask around at breakfast and see if anything rang any bells for either of them.

Right now, he realized, as Sam started rolling around in his sleep, he'd better get some coffee going. Any minute now his brother was going to sit bolt upright in his bed (which just made him even more like their father), and they might as well be ready to go earlier rather than later. If this was something they needed to take care of, they only had until eight tonight before whatever it was killed again.

* * * * * * *

"Dude, stop looking at me like that." Dean snagged another piece of bacon and looked around the quiet diner. They were going to be here for a while, he guessed, waiting for the regulars to come in.

"I just don't get why you're so interested in this," Sam said quietly. Ah, hell. He had that Dr. Phil look in his eyes. "If this is about the striga--"

"It's not." And it wasn't. The striga was toast. Dead, damned, blasted back to whatever hell it had come from. It wouldn't be hurting any more kids or leaving any more parents without their children. Michael was safe and Asher was safe and Sam was safe and it wasn't about that at all. "I just have a feeling and I usually go with those."

His look told Sam to shut the hell up and go with it, too, and surprisingly, Sam did.

"All right, so..." Sam pulled up one of the webpages Dean had saved on the hard drive. "Richard Benton, aged 23. Passing through on his way to grad school."

Dean tore into his toast, sending a grin out to the lovely waitress, Sara, at the counter. "He was only in town for the night--staying at our hotel. Housekeeping found him the next morning when they came in to clean the room."

Sam nodded, skimming the article anyway, even though Dean had already read the damn thing through twice and told him every detail. Control freak. "It says here the preliminary cause of death was suffocation?" He stared at his brother skeptically. "That doesn't sound very supernatural."

Dean shrugged. "There are a lot of ways to stop a guy's breathing." He himself knew five of them from personal experience. Nothing like having a ghost hold a trash bag over your head to make you appreciate oxygen...

_It was getting hard to breathe..._

He shook his head to dispel that damn dream again. The thing was lingering, and that just wasn't like him. Nightmares were something he'd learned to just... have and have done with a long time ago.

"You okay?" Trust Sam to notice.

Dean was about to tell him that, once again, as always, and like normal, he was fine, when the waitress looked up at the jingling of the door. Her face fell and she headed over to greet a slow-moving sheriff's deputy who looked like he'd had a very long night, and accompany him to the counter.

"Hey, Harry," she said quietly, pouring him a cup of coffee while Dean and Sam perfected their not-staring-not-listening-really poses. "How's it going out there?"

Harry was about fifty, and, contrary to rural sheriff stereotypes, he looked like he worked out and was probably pretty light on his feet when he wasn't dealing with crap like this. Dark red hair shot through with grey; short build, but powerful... Looked like a good enough guy. And, Dean could see, a guy who was oh-so demoralized right now.

"One more mystery to add to the pile, Sara," he murmured exhaustedly. "We finished going over the crime scene about an hour ago." He shook his head. "Nothing to find at this one, either."

Dean and Sam exchanged a look. Nothing to find that the cops knew to look for, anyway.

"How are Teena and Brad?"

Harry slumped a little further. "How do you think? Hell, Brad's blaming himself for yelling at the poor kid, and Teena's trying to hold it together for the both of them  _and_  Johnny." He ran a hand through his hair. "I do not want to look at one more parent who's lost a kid, Sara."

Sara nodded sympathetically and patted his hand, and Dean saw an opening. He waved a hand to get her attention and gave Sam a significant look. Time for little brother to do his doe-eyed innocent routine. One thing Dean had learned over the years: People always wanted to share their pain with disinterested parties.

Sara walked up and topped off Dean's coffee. "Anything else I can get you boys?" she asked quietly.

"No," Dean replied, blithe and unconcerned and sounding like he hadn't heard a word she and Harry had said.

"Hey," Sam piped up, all wide eyes and youthful concern. "We heard about that poor kid last night on the news..."

Now why was it that Sam could  _always_  get the floodgates to pop open for him, first try? Didn't seem fair, considering that Dean was the pretty one.

"Tim, yeah," she murmured, shooting a look at Harry over at the counter. But Harry was sunk into thoughts Dean understood too well, and didn't seem to hear them at all. "It's so horrible."

"Do they know what's causing it all?" Sam asked, not too eager, but with just the right amount of caring for a stranger. "I heard there were a couple of others."

Sara was obviously too tired to be suspicious. "Jerry Miller died day before yesterday," she stated bleakly. "Poor kid. His eleventh birthday is... was going to be next week."

Dean's jaw clenched. He'd really had just about enough of kids dying--and almost dying--lately.

"Four of them now. It's a mystery," Sara continued, shuffling her feet uncomfortably. "It's like the town just got cursed."

Which might actually be true.

Sara shook herself. "So, are you boys staying in town?" She didn't sound like she thought that was the best idea. She also obviously didn't know anything. And Harry wasn't going to talk any time soon. Maybe if they took a look at the crime scene. Maybe dug into the history of the place...

"Just passing through," Dean told her, dumping a small pile of cash and change on the table as he rose.

Sam shot him a look, but got up as well, meeting Sara's sad eyes. "We're really sorry to hear about what's been happening," he told her. And Dean knew he meant every word. "I hope everything works out."

"Yeah," she murmured back, her gaze drifting to Harry's hunched back again. "Yeah, I hope so. And soon."

   
 

Sam walked close as they headed back to the hotel. "You want to tell me why we left so quickly?" he muttered angrily.

Dean shrugged. "She doesn't know anything, Sam."

"But we still could have--"

Dean turned to him, stopping in the middle of the road, his own anger rising. "There's going to be another death tonight, Sam. That's the pattern. Something's out there, and it's not going to stop killing long enough for us to interview everybody in this town!"

"And you're  _sure_  this is our kind of job?"

Well, he didn't have to sound so skeptical! Especially when Dean wasn't  _totally_  sure. Still, he nodded decisively and started walking again. "I'm sure."

Sam shook his head, but followed him anyway, as Dean laid out a plan of action. He had the Myers town newspaper in his hands and looked quickly through the morning's lead story. "It's a small town. Shouldn't be too hard to find where Tim died. I'll go out there and take some readings. See if anything lights up."

" _You_  will?" Sam asked. "And what will I be doing?"

Dean grinned. "What you do best, college boy. Research."

* * * * * * *

The little glade still had police tape around it, but it was obvious that it had been picked over completely. Dean drew out his EMF meter and scanned the area.

"Okay," he murmured. "So it's not scorching." But it was warm. The meter registered a mid-level field, so  _something_  had been here recently. And it wasn't strong enough to open up the possibility that Tim had gone ghost on them...

He shook off the thought angrily. What the hell was it with evil that it had to prey on kids all the time?  _Pick on someone your own size, damn it._

_"Mommy?"_

Dean spun around, trying to figure out where the plaintive cry had come from. It sounded an awful lot like the voice from his dream.

_"Mommy, where are you?"_

He headed farther into the woods, peering into the undergrowth for signs of the wayward child he was pretty sure didn't exist, and trying really hard not to freak out completely. The cry didn't come again.

"Hey," he called quietly, mindful of the way voices carried in a small town. "Hey, kid? Where are you?"

The headache blindsided him and he dropped to his knees, struggling to stay conscious as a hundred sensations bombarded him.

_Cold, dark, close-dry-woodsmellcold. Desolation. Panic._

_"Mommy!?" It was getting hard to breathe--_

The ringing of his cell phone jerked him out into the woods again, and Dean sat back on his ass, sucking in air as a faint image of that charm from Sam's nightmare basinet lurked in the fading black spots before his vision. Okay. That was  _not_  normal! Normal for Sam, maybe, but--

The phone rang again and he pulled it out, staring at nothing. "Yeah."

"Hey, it's me," Sam answered. "Find anything?"

Dean nodded in the silence, straining to hear that nightmare voice again.  _Not. Normal._  "Yeah. There's something here, all right."

* * * * *

 


	3. Chapter 3

His hands were still shaking, and he must not have been hiding his freak out very well, because Sam went Oprah on him. "Are you okay? Do you need me to get out there? You sound... weird."

 _Weird is a good word for it_ , Dean thought wryly, dragging himself to his feet. His chest still hurt, reminding him of the many ways there were to suffocate a man. "I'm good," he replied quickly, trying to believe it himself. "What did you find out?"

Sam let it drop--for the moment--and sighed. "That the hall of records burned down about ten years ago."

Dean snorted. "Beautiful." 

"Yeah," Sam agreed. "Look, where are you? The secretary at the County Surveyor's office said there was a local historian in Hadsford--about twenty miles east--who'd be a good source of information."

Dean told him exactly where to find this stretch of woods and headed for the street, still on his phone. "I'll be waiting for you."

"You sure you're all right?"

Dean snorted reassuringly and hung up the phone without answering. Because once he was alone with himself and his memories of that  _closewoodcold_  feeling, he was damn sure that "all right" wasn't a phrase he'd use to describe himself right now.

* * * * * * *

The sun-heat coming off of the leather interior of the Impala did a little to warm Dean up, and he listened as Sam told him what little he'd been able to get from the young (and probably cute, Dean lamented inwardly) county secretary.

"She didn't know anything more about the deaths," Sam was saying as they headed out toward Hadsford. "And she didn't know of anything weird or unusual in the town's past. It was apparently founded by a handful of Irish immigrant families at the turn of the last century."

Dean nodded to himself. "She a local?" People who moved into a town never seemed to really know the place, so there could be this deep, dark secret she wasn't privy to-- _like maybe they sacrifice a couple of tourists once a year,_  he remembered with a gallows smile.

"Yeah--well, she went away to college for a few years, but she was raised here." 

Sam fell silent for a minute, and Dean let the sound of the road under their tires wash away the lingering power of his... whatever he was going to call it. It wasn't a vision. Well, yeah, it probably was. Sort of. He'd had a vision once before, a few years ago, but he didn't remember taking any drugs this morning, so...

"Are you going to tell me what happened out at the crime scene?" Sam finally asked, shattering Dean's illusion that he could just forget that his collapse in the woods had ever happened.

Dean shrugged. "Nothing. The meter showed something, though. Mid-level energies. Nothing that should account for this."

Sam really wasn't buying it. "Nothing, huh?" he asked coldly. "Is that why you sounded like you'd just taken a ten-mile run when you answered the phone?"

Dean looked over at him. "Dude, who runs if there's not something to run from?"

"And there wasn't?" Sam asked carefully.

 _Nice try, Dr. Freud._  "Nope. Just trees." 

Because you couldn't run from something inside your head.

* * * * * * *

Dalia Morsen was eighty years old. Tall and willowy, she must have been hot in her day. Dean could still see the quiet beauty in her smile.

"Looking for the seamy underside of Lichter County, are you, boys?"

Sam smiled his little-boy grin. "Yes, ma'am," he replied, shooting his brother an amused look as the old woman took Dean's arm and led them both into her parlor.

"Well, I'm sorry to say that there's not much to tell," Dalia said, letting Dean settle her into an overstuffed chair in the middle of the room. She had a full tea set in front of her, with steam rising from the pot. Cute surveyor secretary must have called ahead to let her know they were coming. "Would you boys like tea?"

"Oh, yes, ma'am," Dean said brightly, all charm and enthusiasm as he seated himself on the couch nearby.

"So, we were wondering if there was any interesting history in the Myers area," Sam began, reaching across the living room table to take his teacup from Dalia's shaking hands.

"Besides the current tragedies?" she asked, a sad tone to her voice that said that everything that happened in Lichter County was her own private concern.

"We were interested in the history of the town," Dean put in. God, this tea was really horrible. What did she make it out of--rocks? "It was founded by Irish immigrants?" he led her carefully, using one of the few tidbits Sam had been able to pick up this morning. Dean forcibly banished the image of a silver knotwork charm from his mind.

"Yes," Dalia replied, instantly warming to her subject matter. "The Dawsons, the McCreddys, the Finnegals, and the Whelans." She sipped her tea with every sign of loving the stuff. Dean shuddered inwardly and sipped at his again. Nope. Not any better on second tasting. "They had all worked the railroad in the West. Came east in 1900, when the railroad trade dried up, to settle Myers."

"Did they all know each other in Ireland?" Sam asked. Dean nodded his approval. Yeah. If they were dealing with something ancient, maybe it came over with them.

Dalia cocked her head. "No, no, I don't believe so. I think the Finnegals and the Whelans were from Tipperary. I know the Dawsons were from Ulster. And of course the McCreddys were from Galway." She clapped her hands with a gleam in her eyes. "Oh, the McCreddys! If you want to know the sordid details of Lichter,  _that's_  the family to start with."

Dean sat up a little straighter and saw Sam do the same out of the corner of his eye. "Really?"

"Oh yes, young man," Dalia responded, smiling fondly at Dean. What was it about old ladies? They all wanted to hit him or hit  _on_  him. "Deidre McCreddy was a  _witch_ , you see!"

"Really?" Sam drew the question out significantly, and Dean could feel his own hunter's instincts kicking in. Now they were getting somewhere.

Dalia grinned. "Oh, no, of course not 'really.' There's no such thing as witches, dear boy!" Yeah, little did  _she_  know! "No, Deidre knew a great deal about herbs and such, and that's always a witch in some people's books. She was the local midwife, though she'd had such a hard time getting pregnant herself, the poor dear." Dean could see that Dalia probably hadn't had this kind of attention in a long time, and she was preening under the scrutiny. "She and Robert--her husband--had one boy when they arrived here. Bertie, his name was--like the Prime Minister!" She seemed thrilled with the connection, though Dean didn't get it. "When they couldn't get pregnant again, people started talking--as they will. Said that Deidre would sell her soul to the Devil for another child." 

 _That's not too hard to believe,_  Dean thought.

Dalia settled back comfortably. "And she did have another child--eight years later! Benjamin, the last male child to be born to the McCreddy line." She leaned in, placing a dry, frail hand on Dean's forearm. He could see Sam's smirk and he was going to smack the kid one when they got out of here. "And then, when little Benny was only 6 months old, well..." She grinned conspiratorially. "They say the Devil came to collect."

And then she shut up, that knowing smile on her face. 

Dean didn't sigh out loud. He just leaned over, like he was sharing a secret with his grandma, and whispered, "So what happened?" as if he absolutely could not wait to hear the answer. Sometimes, you had to humor them to get the answers.

"Well no one is really sure, but there was a horrible late storm that April--we get them here, sometimes. So much snow, you can't leave your home! Her husband was caught out and couldn't get back for a week. And when he did, he found poor little Benny in his crib, all alone!" She sighed--for dramatic effect. "Deidre and Bertie had disappeared!"

 _Yeah,_  Dean thought.  _That'd do it._  Something had to have happened to her for Deidre to leave her younger son alone and helpless. And if that something was supernatural...? Well, it might explain a lot of what was going on now. Especially if a significant anniversary might be coming up.

"And what year was that, Mrs. Morsen?" Sam asked, though they both knew the answer.

"1906," Dalia replied happily. "Oh my! That's a hundred years ago this month!"

Dean resisted the urge to smack his head against a wall. A hundred years--there's a nice, round, significant number. Terrific.

"So what happened to Robert and Benny?" Sam asked politely, knowing the drill as well as Dean did. Get all the information you can, so you know what you're up against. And Dean had a feeling, given his recent experiences, that they were up against something nasty.

"Poor Robert," Dalia lamented. "He was never the same after his Deidre died. Drank himself to death in 1912." Ouch. Six years of hard drinking. Not Dean's idea of a way to go.

"And Benny?" he asked--both because they needed to know and because Dalia seemed like she just had to share. Never knew if they were going to need more out of her later. "What happened to him?"

Dalia smiled big and stood up, tottering over to an old cherry table by the window. Dean and Sam followed, and she gestured proudly to a pitted, antique silver frame. There stood a tall, thin rake of a man with a short, plump woman and... Dean felt that pain in his chest again.

"He went on to have five beautiful daughters," Dalia was saying, though Dean could barely hear her through the buzzing in his skull. "I'm his oldest."

He couldn't take the energy to be surprised by that bit of serendipity. He was too busy staring at the basinet in the picture, ignoring the beautiful child--presumably Dalia--inside. 

It was Sam's basinet. From the nightmare. The delicate knotwork charm had caught the light when the picture was taken and seemed to be blinking at him.

_Shit._

* * * * *


	4. Chapter 4

Sam obviously knew something was wrong and tried to cover. "Wow," he murmured appreciatively. "You have a fascinating family tree, Mrs. Morsen." Dean could sense his brother trying to catch his attention. "We really appreciate you sharing your story with us. But we should probably--"

"That basinet's really beautiful," Dean heard himself saying, the words from his own mouth shaking him out of his thoughts. He grinned at Dalia, turning up the charm and ignoring Sam's puzzled frown. This was going to take some explaining. Later.

"Oh, the McCreddy crib!" Dalia exclaimed, nodding. "Yes, yes. It's been in the family for nearly two hundred years!" Her face became tragic. "Unfortunately, none of my great-grandchildren have seen fit to need it yet." She sighed. "But I'm sure there's time." Dean was still smiling, so she looked at him with a gleam. "Would you like to see it?"

Dean took a deep breath. He never wanted to see the damn thing again.

"Oh, yes, ma'am," he replied. "I'd love to."

Sam was going to burst in a second, but Dean really, really didn't have time for it just now. He let Dalia take his arm again and lead them both to a back bedroom that was all frilly curtains and white-washed walls.

In the center of the room, the basinet stood like some harbinger of doom, as far as Dean was concerned. It was exactly like the one in his dream--and in that whateverthefuck out in the woods. All homespun fabric and brown and green ribbons--right down to the charm hanging off of the bow at the end of the crib.

He didn't--couldn't--touch it, but he gestured to the silver knotwork. "The charm is so beautiful," he said, trying to sound as polite and interested as possible. "It's a little hard to see in the photograph."

"Ah, yes," Dalia said, fingering it carefully. Gave Dean the creeps. "My grandmother Dawson--my mother's mother, you know?--she told me it's a very old Celtic symbol. A protective charm."

Well, of course it was. Hadn't done Bertie any good, though, had it? Although Benny had been the one in the crib...

This room was giving Dean a headache. And they still had work to do. He took Dalia's hand and placed it on his arm and led her out into the parlor again. "So, were you born here in Hadsford?" he asked conversationally, as if he wasn't trying to get them out of that room as quickly as he could.

"Oh, no, don't be silly," Dalia replied, letting herself be seated in her armchair again. "No, I was born in the family home--just a couple of miles south of Myers city center." She sighed. "My grandson put the house up for sale a few years ago. So sad... But no one has bought it yet..."

Good. Fine. All Dean needed to know--he should be able to find the house, right? Myers was just not that big...

He bowed them out gracefully, making sure to leave Dalia with an impression of two very nice young boys, and headed for the driver's side door of the Impala. And he didn't let Sam say a word until they were on the road.

"Got something to say?" he muttered finally, sick of the look Sam was giving him.

"What the hell was that?"

How to answer...? "I've seen that charm before," he replied tightly. "Hell, I've seen the whole crib before."

"Where?" Right. Like Sam didn't already guess. Dean knew his brother hadn't forgotten how freaked Dean had been when he called him in the woods, and the fact that Dean wanted to investigate this at all had to be weighing on Sam's mind. Hell, the psychic radar was probably pinging like crazy.

"I had a dream this morning, in the hotel room." He was opening himself up for a million questions, but this was something job related, and therefore, necessary. "About after Mom died." 

Sam was silent for a long minute. "And the basinet was in the dream?"

Dean shrugged. "Your crib got burned up in the fire." Okay, that even sounded cryptic to  _him_. "Look, it wasn't a memory, more..."

"A vision," Sam finally guessed. He was making it sound like he was ready to commit his dear old brother.  _Sure. He's "gifted," I'm just crazy. Bitch._

"Yeah," Dean replied reluctantly. "Maybe."

" _You_  had a vision?"

Okay, now that was uncalled for! "What? I can't have visions?"

"No," Sam said seriously, a touch of pain in his voice. "You can't."

"Always gotta be the special one," Dean grumbled back, not thinking about how painful Sam's visions looked or how painful that episode in the woods  _was_. They were getting way off track here. "Look, that doesn't matter--"

"Doesn't matter!?" Sam exclaimed. "Dean, if you're having visions--"

"What matters is that now we have a lead," Dean ground in painfully. They were not going to talk about him and his freaky-ass vision... or visions. Yeah, no way in hell was he telling Sam about that thing in the woods. Not when Sam was already being like this about the dream. Not until he knew what the fuck it meant. "Look, we head out to the McCreddy house, poke around, and try to figure out what's going on."

Sam fumed for a good three miles before he got over it and moved on. 

"This is why you were so interested in this one, isn't it?"

Dean shrugged. "I don't know, Sam," he finally said. "Look, this whole McCreddy thing might not have anything to do with the deaths. It might be some freaky coincidence..." He really hoped it was some freaky coincidence.

"I don't think so," Sam said, that slow method to his voice that said he was putting the pieces together. "There was one thing that all the dead have in common. I found it out at the County Surveyor's, but I didn't connect it until just now."

"Great," Dean muttered. Could this day get any worse? "What is it?"

"All of them were the oldest kids in their families," Sam stated quietly. "And they each had only one sibling..."

"A little brother," Dean finished for him. Well, wasn't that just great?

"Dean, we gotta find out what this thing is." Sam was in all-out worrier mode. "We have less than--" he shot a look at his watch-- "six hours to figure this thing out before..."

Dean smiled, trying to sidetrack him. "You worried about me, Sammy?"

That did it. "Shut up," Sam muttered, silently admitting (to Dean's mind, anyway) that Dean was right and no amount of angsting and worrying was going to do a damn bit of good right now. "Jerk."

"Bitch."

Dean relaxed into the more comfortable silence, but all the same, he broke every speed limit getting back to Myers.

* * * * * * *

The McCreddy house was as easy to find as Dean had hoped. The town had grown up in a cluster and the old house stood by itself on a deserted track well off the traveled roads. 

It was in good shape for a hundred-year-old fixer-upper, but the aging "For Sale" sign out front told them it hadn't attracted a whole lot of notice out here in the boonies of the boonies.

"It's nice," Dean declared sarcastically, looking at the prim and proper front stoop surrounded by dead and rotting vegetation. "A guy could settle down here, raise a family."

Sam snorted and walked on, obviously choosing to ignore Dean's latest dig at the joy of "normal." He'd figure it out eventually. Guys like them didn't get a normal, no matter how much they wanted it.

The front door's paint was peeling and, close up, the house had a heavy feeling of disuse. Nothing malevolent, Dean decided quickly, casting a glance at his brother to see if Sam's Spidey Sense was tingling. Nope. He was just checking the place out, same as Dean himself. So, nothing creepy. Just old and worn out.

The back door was a three-second lockpick and opened into the kitchen. Both men looked around with practiced eyes, taking in the old gas stove, the vintage icebox, the worn floor in the empty eating area.

The living room was similarly empty, but colder, and Dean shivered a little as he looked around, pulling out the EMF meter and doing a quick sweep. 

"Yeah, this place is hot," he murmured after a minute of redlining from his handmade meter. Hot. That was funny, given that it had to be fifteen degrees colder in here than it was outside. Spectral residuals, he guessed, trying to  _think_  himself warm.

"I'm not getting anything on the camera," Sam announced, walking slowly through the room and into the parlor beyond it, eyes glued to the monitor screen of his videocamera. "Maybe whatever happened here really isn't connected to the deaths in town."

"Yeah, maybe," Dean muttered, not really believing it. He had a feeling about this place, now they were inside. Still didn't feel evil... Just this side of strange, maybe. And really sad. But it didn't feel familiar, and that made him breathe a little easier. At least his visions weren't that specific.

He rubbed his free hand down his opposite arm, trying to get warm and refusing to admit to himself that it was like the cold he'd felt in his dream and in the woods. It was just plain old haunted house cold. That was all.

"You getting anything in there?" he called out, listening to the reassuring sound of Sam's footsteps in the next room. The house echoed in that eerie, irritating way that abandoned places did. "'Cause I'm getting frostbite here."

"What?" Sam called back, following his own question up too quickly for Dean to repeat his complaint. "I'm still not seeing anything. Maybe Deidre and Bertie didn't even die in the house..." Dean could hear a tread on the bottom stair to the second story. "I'm going to head upstairs. See if there's anything there."

"Scream if you got something," Dean replied flippantly, making a sweep of the parlor quickly and rubbing at his face, grimacing as his hand came away cold. 

He tried to imagine what this place had looked like when Dalia had lived here. Probably nice and homey. The windows let in a lot of light, and even after all those years, the place was structurally in good shape, so it must have felt like a safe, comfortable place.

"Must be a bitch to heat in the winter, though," he murmured to himself, shivering. He could almost see a snow-packed April night out the window.

Okay, fine. He was going to have to admit to himself that the cold was more about the visions than it was about a cool spring day.

Why the hell did he have to pick this town to stop in? He couldn't have sucked it up and driven another twenty miles? Hadsford looked nice. Probably didn't have many demons lurking around, either.

Looking around the bare living room, he wondered what had really happened here. If it  _was_  a demon, it probably just ate the kid and took off. Mom probably tried to stop it and got killed for her trouble. Demons were known for hanging around, but not when they were summoned to fulfill a specific contract. Once it took the kid, it would have just moved on.

Dean turned to the front hall. Might as well head upstairs and see whether Sam had found anything.

"Nothing upstairs," Sam called out before Dean even had a chance to move, plodding back down to the ground level. His voice sounded like it was coming through a tunnel, though Dean could see him walking into the front hall not ten feet away. It was probably just the icebox they were standing in, freezing his ears. Sam's face wrinkled. "Hey, you okay?"

"Fine," Dean chattered, turning to the kitchen and clamping down on his jaw with effort, as his arms came around his body to ward off the cold. "Dude, it's frickin'  _freezing_  in here!"

The tone of his brother's voice had him turning back to meet a puzzled, worried face.

"No, Dean. It's not."

And really, it must not have been. Sammy looked perfectly comfortable in his t-shirt and jeans while Dean stood shaking in his leather jacket. Which meant--

Anything he might have thought it meant flew out of his head as pain invaded, that now-familiar headache pulsating through his skull. "Damn!"

"Dean?" Sam's voice was filtered, mugged, caught in the ringing in his ears, though this time he managed to keep to his feet. It was suddenly very, very dark, with only a hint of light coming from the kitchen. 

_"Mommy!"_

Dean looked up at the sound of the dream-voice, and saw a small boy of about eight standing in the doorway to the parlor. He looked scared.

"Bertie," Dean whispered, causing Sam to jerk around to look at the kid. Or look through the kid. He didn't seem to see him.

"Dean, what the hell--" Sam blurted.

 _"Mommy?"_  Bertie called out again. 

_"In here, Bertie. Hurry!"_

Dean spun around, watching a pretty freakin' solid-looking Mama ghost walk out of the kitchen, carrying a baby on her hip. She looked more frightened than the kid.

"And Deidre. Great," he muttered, watching the kid run across to his mom. She managed to hug him while still holding the baby in one hand and a lantern in the other. It was a mom thing. Hell, Dean remembered their mom juggling him and Sam  _and_  a couple of bags of groceries. 

Sam closed the distance between them and put a hand on Dean's arm. A hand that did a hell of a lot to warm Dean as he started shivering all over again. "They're here?" Sam asked, his voice stressed and high. 

"You can't--?" Okay, no. Dean was not going to ask  _you can't see them!?_  like he was in some bad horror movie. That'd be seriously tacky.

 _"Honey,"_  Deidre was saying, leading her son to a small cupboard...

Yeah. Small cupboard-- _that wasn't even freakin' there!_

"Tell you what, Sam," Dean muttered through teeth that clacked together in the frigid air. "I'll be the Dashing Hero. You deal with this Stupendous Yappi crap, okay?" His  _breath_  was standing out now, and the headache rivaled that hangover he'd had after Philadelphia. "This is too freakin' weird."

Sam looked around at nothing, concern making him look about ten. Funny that the kid looked so young when he was worried. Dean always felt like he himself looked about forty when  _he_  was doing the worrying.

"What's going on, Dean?"

Dean waved his hand at the corner in irritation, trying to ignore the fact that his lips had to be turning blue by now. Why'd he have to be the one to pull the psychic card today? "Deidre and the kids. Whatever happened is about to happen again."

It would have been hilarious to watch the battle between Sam's worry and his curiosity, but Dean found himself being a little less nonchalant about it all as a charged feeling of dread grew in the room and Deidre opened the door of the cupboard and ushered her older son inside.  _"I want you to be very quiet..."_

"Dean, we need to leave. Now." Sam's demand was filtered by the cold as he talked over the woman. He tried to pull Dean toward the door, but this was important, damn it! It was the key to the whole thing.

" _Dude_. Shut up." If Dean was going to have to witness what felt like a seriously bad past, he'd rather see it all now and get it over with.

 _"--right here, Bertie. Please."_  Deidre closed the door of the cupboard and locked it, quickly taking a stick of chalk--or something--from her skirt pocket and marking the door with the protective symbol that graced Benny's basinet.  _"Mommy will fix this. I promise."_

The room felt smaller now, like the walls were closing in, and Dean watched Deidre put Benny in his crib. He knew now that the charm had protected the younger McCreddy, and that had been her plan all along.

 _"You stay right there, Benny,"_  she whispered lovingly. Dean's shaking wasn't just from the cold now, and he barely heard Sam asking him what was going on. At least he could still feel the warm, warm hand on his arm.

Deidre stood defiant, waiting in the darkness, and Dean could feel that  _someoneelsehere_  feeling that haunts often gave off. The  _someoneelse_  was pissed, too, by the feel of it.

 _"You can't have him!"_  Deidre screamed at the air around her, and Dean felt his ears pop as a dark mist congealed in the far corner of the room.

"Dean? Dean! Can you even hear me!?"

He would have answered, but right now, Sam seemed too far away to get to. Right now, a fierce mother and her helpless children were all that Dean could concentrate on. 

The mist gathered a face into itself--a hard set of lines, and slits for mouth and nose, and gaping maws for eyes, and Dean shuddered, not wanting to hear it speak.

He didn't.

 _"No!"_  Deidre replied in a wail to something Dean couldn't hear. Damn it! What good was this freakin' vision if he couldn't hear both sides of the story!?

 _"He's my son, and you can't have him!"_  Deidre drew herself up, reaching into the folds of her skirt and pulling out another charm on a chain. It looked like Benny's amulet, only heavier, more complex.  _"Go back! You're not wanted here!"_

 _Wanted or not, lady, it's staying,_  Dean thought blackly.

True to his thoughts, the mist gathered itself and launched at her, enveloping her in violence. What happened next was loud and gruesome and made Dean's ears hurt. Though it all happened in one long, disgusting second for him, he could tell that, back then, it had taken hours. 

Once Deidre was... beyond caring... the darkness slid silently forward, ignoring the basinet and heading straight for the cupboard.

Dean felt panic well up in him and tried to tell himself that this was only the past, after all. Not even  _his_  past. It couldn't hurt him. 

He dimly realized that the panic wasn't his, but he couldn't stop it as his heart started thumping harder when the mist tried to envelop the cupboard, only to be repelled violently. He felt a heavy shock of magic run through him.

Like he was the one in the cabinet...

 _"Mommy?"_  Bertie's voice was lost and frightened and desolate, and the air around Dean was close and dark and  _colddarkwood_.

"Aw fuck," Dean whispered. He really, really didn't want to see this--didn't want to  _feel_  this.

The mist slammed itself against the cabinet again and again before angrily turning toward the basinet. Dean ignored the fact that he was starting to pant from panic and a distinct lack of oxygen, and reminded himself that he'd met proof today that Benny had survived. He forced himself to forget the fact that Bertie hadn't.

"What's going on, Dean? Damn it." From the very distant sound of it, Sam was going to burst a blood vessel sooner than Dean was--and Dean was pretty damn sure his brain was starting to liquefy at this point.

The mist approached the crib carefully, as if it could feel the magic there. It circled, confused, and Dean got the idea that it was trying to figure out what to do next.

 _"Mommy!?"_  Bertie's terrified voice was accompanied by a mad pounding. Dean's hands hurt just thinking about it.

The mist turned at the sound, and slammed against the cabinet one more time before oozing into the floorboards, leaving behind a smell of disappointment. That last attack on the heavy piece of furniture toppled it, and it dropped forward, pinning the doors between the floor and body of the cabinet. Dean felt his legs finally give out, and he crashed down with it, dimly hearing Sam shout his name.

 _"Mommy!"_  Bertie again, and a cry of pain. The boy pummeled the wood around him, and Dean felt blood run down his arm and a bone give in his hand. He could hear a baby start to wail, the sound muffled by the heavy cabinet his mind was stuck in.

"Dean?" Sam's voice was very, very far away now, as Dean struggled to breathe. The cupboard must have been well-made. There wasn't any room for air in here.

"Dean!?" More insistent now, but almost lost in the silence of  _inside_. "Dean, man, talk to me!"

And  _inside_  was growing even colder. And darker. Safe and alone in his basinet, Benny was screaming in earnest now. But Mommy wasn't answering  _him_ , either.

"All right, man, that's enough." Sam sounded angry now.

But it wasn't enough. He wasn't getting out. Mommy wasn't coming back...

Suddenly, Dean felt a safe, comforting warmth across his stomach and the backs of his knees as the darkness began to take him completely. Part of his mind knew that Sam had him in a fireman's carry--it tried to concentrate on the fact that this was a vision. It wasn't real. It couldn't hurt him. Sam was here and he'd take care of things, even if Mommy wasn't coming back. He tried to keep himself separate and failed, though that small still-Dean part of his mind tried not to think about whether Sam felt this helpless when he had his visions...

He focused on the feel of Sammy as much as his battered mind could manage, and marveled that he could faintly feel Bertie's breath when it stopped.

And even then, Benny screamed on...

* * * * * * *


	5. Chapter 5

His mouth tasted weird. But, God, he was finally starting to get warm!

"Dean?" Sammy. Losing it, by the sound of him. "Dean, come on. You have to be okay."

Dean opened his eyes to find his brother looking down at him, silhouetted by the late afternoon sun that was warming Dean up more and more by the second. He met Sam's panicked gaze with a reassuring, if thoroughly exhausted, grin.

"Now you know how I feel when you pull your 'Shining' thing on me," he croaked.

Sam sat back, exposing Dean's face to the full force of the sun. Dean closed his eyes again and soaked up the warmth for a minute before Sam put a careful, shaking hand on his shoulder.

"Don't--" Sam started, panicking again.

"Dude, chill," Dean murmured back. "I'm just trying to warm up, okay?"

"No," Sam stated tightly. "No, it is not okay. Dean,  _you stopped breathing_! Even after I got you out of there, I still had to..."

Dean ran his tongue over his lips. That explained the funny taste. 

"Dude. Brush before you do that, okay?"

There was a long moment of silence, and Dean opened his eyes again and watched Sam trying to get himself under control. It was a hell of a battle.

"Seriously," he prodded, feeling his strength slowly edge back. "What the hell did you eat today?" He quirked an eyebrow, as outrageous as possible.

"Jerk," Sam finally murmured, grinning shakily.

"Bitch," Dean replied, striving for their version of normal.

Must have worked a little, because Sam was calming down. His curiosity was taking over. "So what the hell happened in there?"

Dean's jaw ground his teeth into dust for a minute before he could answer, remembering Bertie's pitiful cries for help.

"Well, it looks like Deidre really did sell her soul--or at least her firstborn."

Sam looked vaguely sick. "You're kidding me."

"I wish I was." Dean decided he'd look a whole lot less stupid sitting up. He got his hands under him and pushed, hissing in pain when his right hand didn't cooperate. He expected blood and broken bones, but it was just phantom pain now, and he tried to shake it off as Sam helped him sit up. 

"I figure it must have been the usual," he continued, shamelessly enjoying the oxygen flowing in and out of his lungs. "They never think it's a binding agreement until it's a binding agreement." People were idiots.

"Yeah," Sam concurred, making Dean smile at the synchronicity between unspoken thought and word. "So, if the demon got him, why the attacks? I mean, shouldn't this have been over a hundred years ago?"

Dean shook his head, glad that the headache had melted away with the vision. "It never finished the job," he muttered, struggling to his feet with Sam's help. "Deidre locked Bertie in a cabinet. Signed it with that protective symbol." He straightened painfully, feeling muscles creak. "She tried to stop the demon herself, but you know that never works."

"But it couldn't get to Bertie." Sam was fussing; brushing at the dust on Dean's back, holding on to his shoulder, basically reassuring himself that his brother was still alive. And Dean just let him. They still had a lot of work to do and it wasn't going to get done if Sam was going to have to sit down and have a freak out.

"Nope," he agreed blithely, radiating well-being. And actually, he didn't feel too bad. The headache was gone; he was breathing....

Now if he just had a breath mint. Damn!

"It couldn't get into the cabinet--not like it didn't try." He tried to stave off a bout of nausea at the memory. "It turned the damn thing over and... Bertie couldn't get out."

Sam looked green. "Wow."

"Yeah," Dean agreed. "Wow." He slapped at the dust on his jeans. "I don't know if he could have gotten out anyway, with the magicks on the doors. Might have taken Deidre to open it." And by the time the demon took off, she was way beyond helping.

Sam nodded, thinking. "But... Dalia said that Deidre and Bertie disappeared. If the demon didn't get him..."

Dean headed for the clearing at the back of the house, moving slowly and knowing Sam would follow. "Yeah, I think Robert probably lied about that. I mean, I would." He shuddered. "Dude, come home after a week to find your wife and kid in that condition? And if he knew his wife was conjuring powers...? I wouldn't be telling anybody."

"So how did Benny survive?" Sam wanted to know.

"Who knows? Kids are resilient." He suppressed a shudder at that. It freaked him out that he knew exactly how long it had taken Bertie to die in that  _closecoldwood_... 

He didn't find anything in the backyard to help him out. Robert had to have put them somewhere...

"What are you looking for?"

"The graves." He turned to Sam and explained as quickly as he could, the conclusions forming themselves as they left his mouth. "I don't think the murders now are the demon. I think they're the kid."

"Bertie? But--"

"Hear me out," Dean interrupted, holding up a hand. "Bertie was trapped in that cabinet for almost a week before he died."  _Don't ask me how I know that._  "I'll bet that there were only going to be a few more deaths anyway." Except that they were going to stop it before it went that far.

Sam nodded at the plausibility.

"What if Bertie's spirit is... trying to reach out?" Dean continued. "Find Mom, share the pain, whatever--the point is, I think if we find him and dispose of the bones, we can stop it."

It always surprised Dean when Sam  _wasn't_  surprised by his leaps of logic. Sam just automatically assumed that he knew what he was talking about at times like this. 

Dean just hoped he was right, this time.

Sam was digging in his pocket and came out with his cell phone. 

"What are you--" Dean began as his brother dialed.

"Mrs. Morsen?" Sam said into his phone, bright and polite. "Hi. It's Sam Winchester. We spoke this morning?" Dean was sort of enjoying the pained smile on his brother's face. "Yes, ma'am. Winchester. Like the rifle..." Sam looked over at him and frowned at Dean's amusement. "He's fine, ma'am... Yes, he is..." He cleared his throat, grinning his own amusement and making Dean wonder just what the old lady was saying about him. 

"I was wondering if I could ask you just one more question, Mrs. Morsen. Did Robert ever build a monument for Deidre and Bertie? I know there were no bodies to bury, but... He did? Really? Where, exactly?" This was driving Dean nuts. "Yes, ma'am. Well, thank you so much again, Mrs. Morsen... He'll sure try, ma'am. Thanks. Bye."

Sam took a deep breath, and Dean could sympathize. Old ladies took a lot out of you. After a moment where Sam seemed to fight the urge to slap the grin off of Dean's face, he smiled.

"Robert built a chapel in the woods," he told Dean with a significant look. "There are monuments for both of them."

Dean nodded in satisfaction. "Well, all right," he said, heading back to the Impala for the shovels, salt, and lighter fluid. He was going to sleep for a week when this was over, but for now, he felt like he was almost at full strength. "Let's get this over with."

"Oh, and Dean?" Sam called out, not moving from his spot. "Mrs. Morsen wants you to come by and visit before we leave." He grinned that grin that had made Dean want to hit him every time he'd seen it since they were kids. "You're such a nice young man."

"Yeah, eat me."

   
 

The little wooden chapel was overgrown and barely visible, but Dalia had given Sam specific enough directions that it wasn't hard to find. They cleared away the rubble until they had two memorials: one a simple carved stone set in the ground reading "Deidre McCreddy, devoted wife and mother"; the other an upright gravestone that read "Bert McCreddy, firstborn and beloved. Blood of my blood." The gravestone had a sizeable carving of the protective symbol that had saved Benny McCreddy's life.

 _Too bad it doomed Bertie._  Dean tightened his grip on his shovel and dug into the ground before the stone--

"Son of a  _bitch_!"

\--and bounced back painfully as his shovel refused to break the surface.

"What happened?" Sam surged forward, taking a hold of Dean's arm like he thought his brother was going to collapse any second now. Dean threw him off in irritation.

"I'm fine," he growled, tapping the ground beneath his feet with the shovel. The blade of it didn't even make a dent. He looked up at the gravestone. "I guess it does more than keep the demons out," he murmured. "Fuck. We don't burn this kid, and..." And he himself was probably the next target. Again.

"Wait a minute," Sam exclaimed, the hamsters in his brain running a hundred miles an hour, if the look in his eyes was anything to judge by. "Didn't Dad say something about protective charms once? Something about how to unlock them..."

Dean's memory for what Dad said was always sharp. " 'Like opens like.' " He looked at the inscription.  _Firstborn and beloved. Blood of my blood._  Would two out of three be enough?

He dropped his shovel and drew his knife, kneeling before the carved symbol. A long, painful cut of his hand later, and he had blood pooling in his palm while Sam watched silently. Dean looked up into worried eyes and grinned.

"Guess we'll see how Dad really feels about me."

He placed his bloody hand against the symbol and tried not to scream. It hurt. A whole hell of a lot, in fact. He heard Sam gasp in the background, but his mind was focused on the magicks that were running him over. The stone hissed in protest, and Dean could smell his own flesh burning, but he didn't let go.

"Come on, you mother," he growled. "Open."

It did. With a gust of wind, the stone threw him back on his ass and glowed for a moment before the heat around it dissipated. 

Sam was at Dean's side to help him up. "You okay?"

Dean ignored the question for long enough to retrieve his shovel and dig a satisfying divot in the dirt covering Bertie's grave. Examining his hand, he saw that the cut had been burned closed, which was all kinds of painful, but at least assured he could dig without slipping on his own blood. 

He looked up at Sam and noticed that the sun was already setting. "Well, all right. Let's get to work."

* * * * * * *


	6. Chapter 6

It was seven-thirty and pitch black before Sam's shovel hit wood and bounced off. Dean stood at the side of the grave in his shirt sleeves, looking down into the hole as his brother took a turn at the hard labor. After all, he reasoned with a smug grin, he  _did_  almost die today. That had to be worth something, right?

"Got it," Sam muttered, sounding almost as tired as Dean felt, as he used the blade of his shovel to clear dirt away from the wood. "Give me the flashlight."

The bright white light illuminated the cabinet that Dean was already familiar with, and the sight of the untouched wood with its delicate chalk-drawn symbol made him swallow hard. He hated being right, sometimes.

"Robert couldn't open it," Dean murmured. "He just buried the thing whole."

And if that meant that Bertie's body was as well-preserved as the cabinet itself and had never decomposed, Dean was seriously going to hurl.

Sam had thought about it--it was clear in the sick tones of his voice. "So how do we torch it?" He tapped the wood with his shovel, but not like he actually thought it would do anything.

Dean sighed, pulling out his knife and dropping into the grave beside his brother. Time to donate another pint. "Next time, you get to be the firstborn."

He didn't need the backwash from the flashlight to know that Sam was smirking at him. "Makes sense. After all--"

Sam's taunt was swallowed by a freezing wind that smelled familiar to Dean. Except that now the disappointment was shot through with the hope of triumph, bringing a chill Dean had thought was long gone.  _Shit._

"Son of a bitch came back for his prize," he muttered, crying out in pain as he was suddenly flung from the grave by the force of the demon, who slammed into the cabinet for the first time in a century. Dean landed on Bertie's gravestone, knocking it over, and bellowed as the protective symbol that was already fueled by his own blood began to burn through his shirt and into his back. Through the haze and smell of it, he heard Sam cry out, and a thud that might have been his brother landing on his own back.

"God  _damn_  it!" Dean gritted, trying to pull himself up.

"No, Dean!" Sam shouted from somewhere in the darkness, his voice laced with pain. "Stay where you are!"

Dean threw an incredulous look at the night. "Little uncomfortable here, Sammy!" And way out of the fight, which was even less acceptable.

"Dean, it's the symbol--the demon can't come after you if--" Sam broke off with a grunt, and Dean could hear a body hitting earth again. Yeah, it couldn't come after him, but it was damn sure trying to make lunch out of Sam!

Banishing the image of Deidre's long, gruesome death from his mind, Dean pulled himself off of the carving, feeling his back still on fire. Fuck, that hurt!

"Come on, bitch!" He bellowed, trying to attract the thing as he heard clothing tear somewhere nearby. Where the hell was the flashlight? "Come and get me!"

Except that it wasn't coming. The burns on his back must have been pretty bad--bad enough to imprint the symbol and protect him from the demon. And protect the demon from him. Dean tried to peer through the darkness, but all he could do was listen as the fucking thing tried to take Sam apart.

_"Mommy?"_

"Oh, Christ, kid, not now," Dean muttered, feeling his throat already constricting, feeling the  _closedarkwood_  of the cabinet that dominated Bertie's soul. Caught between a demon and a dead kid's memory, he struggled to breathe, at a loss for what to do.

_"Mommy!"_

But only for a second.

Listening for any signs from the darkness--taking every one of his brother's groans of pain, every whoosh of air forced from lungs at point of impact, as a sign that Sam was still kicking--Dean dropped back into the grave, using the sliver of light from the flashlight, half-buried in the dirt, to find his knife.

He needed to be right about this. Bertie's spirit had been trapped in there with the magic for a hundred years. It had better be as powerful as he hoped it was. It was powerful enough to fill him with its own panic, after all--powerful enough that he was beginning to be more than a little light-headed... 

Sam screamed once--a short burst of sound cut off by a frightening thud--and Dean shook his head to clear it and sliced into his palm again, not bothering to notice that the cut was too deep, the bloodflow too quick. He slammed his hand down on the symbol written in chalk and decided he didn't care what Bertie looked like now, so long as the kid could do what Dean thought he could.

The cabinet opened faster than the grave had, and Dean barely had time to brace himself for the burning pain before he was flung back as the doors smacked open. The light that came out of it was blinding, and Dean just had time to drag himself to the lip of the grave before Bertie's spirit shot out and crashed into the black mist, sending Sam flying with yet another shout of pain.

"SAM!" Dean didn't think his brother could be conscious after a toss like that. And if by some miracle he was, he shouldn't have been able to hear even that bellow over the unholy scream of the demon as Bertie made contact. But as Dean pulled himself out of the grave, grabbing the flashlight as he went, he could see Sam wave at him weakly. He grinned, groaning at the pain of the burns on his back, and skirted the battle zone to kneel at Sam's side.

"Damn it, Sam," he grumbled in irritation, trying to get his sliced up hand to close around the flashlight so he could use the other one to push Sam's hair back from his face. He couldn't manage it and set the flashlight on the ground next to him instead, so he could have a clear view of the damage.

Sammy was a mess. Blood covered his chest, peeking through the tatters that had been his t-shirt, and his face was mottled with bruising. Still, he was mostly conscious, and trying to sit up, and staring blearily at the clash of light and dark that dominated the sky above them.

"Bertie?" Sam asked weakly, gesturing to the battle with the hand that  _didn't_  look a little broken. Great. Neither of them was going to be two-fisted if Bertie lost this fight. They were probably headed for the hospital after this, too, which meant questions they weren't going to want to answer...

Dean shrugged off that depressing realization and nodded, dragging his brother to his feet and pulling him awkwardly away from the fray. Fuck. He'd probably cut a tendon opening the damn cabinet. "Bertie," he confirmed. A grin broke out. "Kid's a hell of a fighter."

And he was. The battle didn't last more than another minute, and at the end of it, the white mist that had once been a scared little kid was the only thing with them in the woods. 

Dean settled his brother carefully on the ground next to the grave. Sam was hurting and bleeding and more than a little out of it, and he seemed content to just sit wherever he was put, for the moment. 

Bracing himself to look into the cabinet for the first time, Dean breathed a sigh of relief as the flashlight's beam rested on a small skeleton that made his chest hurt from something other than a lack of air.

Salt and lighter fluid soon anointed the bones, and the white mist lay calmly over the ruins of the chapel, waiting for release.

Dean looked up into it, and a smile lightly tugged at his lips. "You did good, Bertie," he said gently, painfully lighting a match and tossing it into the cabinet six feet below. "Time to go."

He'd always convinced himself that he couldn't feel spirits leave. The bad guys left in a gust of fetid air, and the good guys just left, and he never felt any of them, because that would be... weird.

But as he slung Sam's arm over his shoulder, careful not to damage either of them any more and not even waiting for the flames to die down, Dean could have sworn he felt Bertie's gratitude.

* * * * * * *

The trip back to their hotel room was a blur for Dean, but he was willing to bet he'd remember it a lot more clearly than Sam would. 

Once they stumbled to the car, Dean had made Sam strip off what was left of his t-shirt so he could use the tatters to wrap his own badly bleeding hand. Next order of business had been getting Sam warm, and he'd forced his little brother to shrug into a sweatshirt that resided in the Impala's back seat, wincing in sympathetic pain as the movement obviously tore at the slices in Sam's chest and back.

Sam, however, didn't wince at all. He did everything he was told by rote, and it didn't take a genius to realize that, somewhere in all that cat-and-mouse, the demon must have knocked him on the head pretty soundly.

It only took a moment of carding through his brother's hair to find the lump--complete with blood--and Dean leaned Sam against the fender, watching him carefully. He put a hand in front of Sam's eyes, giving him the finger. "How many fingers am I holding up?"

Sam was with it enough to glare weakly at him and toss off a whispered, "Asshole."

"Still in there somewhere," Dean had replied with a smile. "Good to know."

The rest of the trip had been silent, save a few understandable groans from one or the other of them when the road got too rough. Dean thanked... something... that the guy watching the hotel desk was half asleep, because he really didn't want to explain why they were both in the bruised and bloodied condition they were.

Tossing a blanket from the car over Sam's bedspread took the last of the mobility out of Dean's left hand, and he swallowed a curse as he led Sam to that resting place and sat him down.

"Don't bleed on the bedspread, okay?" he said, turning to the triage kit he'd brought up from the car and pulling out the gauze and alcohol wipes. "You're paying to replace the crappy-ass thing if you do."

On a better night, he'd have expected some sort of lame comeback. As it was, he was just glad they were both breathing. Though he was staring through Dean--and everything else--Sam seemed like he'd probably stay upright, or at least fall on the bed instead of on the floor, so Dean figured his first order of business was to fix himself up well enough to take care of his brother.

He unwound the shreds of Sam's t-shirt from his hand and groaned. It was a mess, all right. The first slice was fused closed by the burns that blistered his palm and the insides of his fingers. The burns might make things difficult for a while, but the cut wasn't something he needed to worry about, long term. The second cut was much deeper, and it hadn't had a chance to cauterize when he opened the cabinet, because Bertie had been oh so ready to get the hell out of there. At least he could still wiggle his fingers--even if doing so made him want to throw up.

Yeah, between the burns and the knife cuts, he'd be lucky if the thing didn't scar. He  _knew_  the burns on his back were going to, but there was nothing he could do about that. At least he'd be safe from any marauding Celtic demons from now on. One less ward to worry about.

Once it was cleaned and wrapped, his hand felt a little better, but it was still hell getting Sammy out of his sweatshirt so Dean could dress his wounds. Luckily, none of the claw marks on his chest looked like it needed stitching. Dean sucked at sutures at the best of times, and this really, really wasn't that.

He tested Sam's bad hand, twisting it carefully and trying to feel for anything out of place. Didn't feel broken, after all, but Sam wasn't much help in the matter. Dean didn't think he would have noticed if the thing was amputated at this point.

"You need stitches," Sam said, breaking his silence finally as Dean finished wrapping the wrist. It was probably only a bad sprain, but Dean would keep an eye on it, just to be sure. 

Dean shrugged and looked at his own hand, now cramped up and screaming. "It's stopped bleeding," he offered--which was a total lie, but not one that Sam could see clearly enough right now to see through. "Couple of butterfly bandages and it'll be fine."

Sam just nodded placidly, and Dean started rethinking that emergency room. All he needed was Sam going into a coma in the middle of the night...

"What are we going to do about your visions?" Sam asked as Dean moved around to his back and cleaned the claw marks with alcohol. Maybe it was better that Sam wasn't with it, because that one should have hurt like a mother. Maybe he was going to pulling out the needle after all.

"Nothing," Dean bit out tersely.

"But Dean--"

"It'll be fine," Dean interrupted, standing up and heading back to the first aid kit. "It was all Bertie, anyway." He willed it to be true. "First born and all that."

Sam was obviously starting to come around. At just the wrong time, of course. "We don't know that."

Dean's good hand balled into a fist. "No, we don't. But it's a lot more likely than me turning into the Amazing Kreskin overnight, isn't it?"

"I did."

The soft admission was almost more than Dean could take right now. He was tired and beaten and he just... didn't have the energy for this shit.

"Well, you're special, Sammy," he finally offered, throwing a wad of gauze at the trash can with more force than he was up for. "Some of us are just plain folk."

But Sam was warming to his subject. "But Dean, think about it. What if... what if your abilities are just developing more slowly? I mean, look at Max--he was a lot more advanced than I was, but--"

Dean growled in frustration. This was not the time to have this discussion. 

"I don't have any abilities, Sam, all right?" He headed to the bathroom and filled a glass of water, bringing it and one of their stash of vicodin back with him and offering both to his brother. "Now take your medicine and go to sleep."

"No, Dean, we have to talk about this--"

"Well, can we talk about it when you're not held together by gauze and fuckin' medical tape!?" Dean roared, losing his temper finally. He cooled immediately and offered the gifts of sleep again, using the fact that his left hand was shaking so hard it was threatening to drop the pill as an excuse.

"Can we just talk about this later?" he asked again, more calmly.

Sam looked up at him, focusing clearly for the first time tonight, and sighed. "Probably not," he replied quietly, bowing to the inevitable and taking the pill and water.

"There's a good boy," Dean said, trying not to sound like he was trying too hard. Sam graced him with a glare and he figured that, once again, they'd reached one of the uneasy truces in their lives that always led to something more comfortable when they'd both had time to sleep on it.

Dean plopped down on his own bed, piling the pillows high against the headboard. "Get some sleep. Checkout's at noon, and I, for one, can't wait to get the hell out of this town."

Sam carefully laid back on the blanket, too tired or too sore to even try to take off his jeans, and Dean held his breath until he heard his brother start to snore that polite snore of his.

They weren't visions. People like him didn't  _have_  visions. Visions were for people like Sam--people who were... tapped into something that Dean only ever saw from the outside. And that was the way he liked it.

He left the light on, so he could keep an eye on Sammy, and tried very hard not to think about things. He tried not to think about Sam's visions, about powers that came with such a heavy toll, about Bertie, stuck in that cabinet for a century....

His hand was throbbing. Damned if he was going to bleed on his own bedspread after threatening Sam about the same thing. He rose, going back to the desk in the corner and sitting beside the first aid kit so he could clean the damn knife cuts up again.

No, Dean wasn't one of those touchy-feely people who saw and felt and heard other people's pain so they could help them. He'd been able to help Bertie because Bertie told him where to go. That was all. End of story.

Everybody had a role, after all, and Dean knew his. He watched Sam sleep for a few minutes, smiling absently as he set his watch alarm to wake him in two hours so he could make sure Mr. Sensitive was okay.

And Sammy had his role, too. He was the psychic in this family. And you only needed one.

Dean? He was just the hired muscle.

* * * * * * *  
The End 


End file.
